As CEO of the new INVNT/IP Consortium, I was in Washington, DC, for a week, visiting Cabinet-level officials to bring them a new message: the nation-sponsored cyber attacks on US corporations are not the result of a purely military plan, but of a new national business model. The perpetrators aren’t stealing military secrets alone, but rather have expanded to stealing commercial crown jewel intellectual property. The challenge has moved from beefing up security for some future military attack to not losing commercial advantage in real time.

To close the circle, I suggested that the result of this new onslaught – the erosion or destruction of return on investment (ROI) in our invention-based economy – was perhaps our greatest national security issue. Everyone present agreed.